My Dream

There is commotion everywhere as the Prime Minister has called an impromptu press conference. All the cameras are on him as he begins. "I am here today to belatedly give some justice to those who were arrested under the Internal Security Act, especially the group of 22 detained in May and June of 1987." He continues, "This was an act perpetrated by my father, I regret to say, one of his many evil deeds during his reign, and I deeply regret and apologise for the misconstruction of reality at that time. The 22 detainees were do-gooders from a number of different organisations and didn't even know what it meant to be a Marxist…" The alarm clock rang precisely at that moment and it meant I was not to hear any further, the good minister's explanations.

May 21, 1987 is etched in my brain as it wasn't at any normal time of day that the telephone rang. My very good friend and daughter's godmother, Jane Leong, had been on holiday with us in Melbourne, Australia, and was due to fly home that afternoon, but at 5am that morning after we had been to see Tom Cruise in Born on the Fourth of July the night before and were still having dreams about him and the cruelties of war, our home telephone rang jarringly. One of the younger Student Christian Movement (SCM) members was on the line speaking in a garbled, worried, incoherent way about arrests and telling Jane not to return home. The time of the call was sufficient for us to question if the caller was high or misinformed. We waited to be able to see some hard news print (those being days when the internet was still something relatively new), to make sense of what had happened.

Of course we were shocked and worried. It wasn't clear how many had been arrested, just that it had been done in the dead of night, and when we later saw the mug shots of the 16 arrested it was clearly designed to shock and stun and to make them appear like common criminals.

Jane (being Jane) wanted to get on the first plane home but succumbed to reason when she realised that once in prison she would be powerless as it was not a fight against a few individuals but the machinery of State. We were convinced that this would be her fate as when we studied the 'conspiracy' chart it was only the Student Christian Movement leadership that was missing. Both she as well as the next possible leader, Juliet Tan (who was then a student in the United Kingdom), were away.

The next few days were frantic as we tried to glean from afar whatever information we could get and to bring together a little network of concerned friends. There were clandestine phone calls from Singapore as younger SCM members tried to get word to us; they were fearful but brave in all they did. The Straits Times was still something we had to rely on but it wasn't long before New Zealand friends put out a public news sheet with alternative news. What was surprising was how wide-sweeping the arrests were, from religious groups concerned about social justice issues to legal organisations perturbed over the Newspaper and Printing Presses Amendment Bill to drama groups exposing migrant worker rights (or lack of it). In one fell swoop the Internal Security Department had concocted a ludicrous figment of imagination which even included a student exile from the 70s.

The days following were filled with The Straits Times nausea, namely the constant spewing out of the same propaganda… Marxists, overthrow, violence, Catholic Church, Vincent Cheng… we knew that as part of its strategy to brainwash Singaporeans, if they heard it long enough fiction would become fact and all the senses would be so numbed as not to be able to differentiate truth from lies.

What could we do where we were? These were friends; Jane knew what they had been up to in their different organisations — trying to do some good for those socially-disadvantaged, reading, writing, thinking and questioning the government's and society's values and trying to promote different ones (yes, you can call some of them Christian), speaking against injustice to the rule of law or being creative in presenting some social realities. Things that wouldn't have raised an eyebrow in the so-called Free World but which were tantamount to treason in this tiny city state.

The days that followed were filled with reaching out to anyone we knew who cared and would render some form of help to these people behind prison bars. Word of torture emerged, the number of slaps one detainee received or the mental rape another endured when they read aloud her personal letters to her.

Of course the Catholic Church in Australia was approached, then-Bishop George Pell (who even then had the reputation of being extremely difficult to convince) was only one of 200 international organisations that sent in letters of protest to the Singapore government over this situation. Indian Pacific, one of our Australian channels, did a report on the arrests, the Parliamentary Amnesty International group and a range of other organisations heard about the vindictiveness of the Singapore government and the Internal Security Department and acted accordingly.

There were no highlights at our end, or maybe I have just forgotten them; it was just consistent, constant networking — juggling organising work and raising the little god-daughter who kept us alive and happy — and worrying about the next stage of what would happen to those who had been arrested. When would they be released? What contact were they being allowed with their families? With 16 disparate people, it was not easy to keep tabs on what was developing, who were suffering. We heard what the Catholic Church was doing — organizing masses, prayer support, we heard how Vincent Cheng's family was responding, how they were banding together for their brother; the New Zealand 'press' cranked up their work, we heard what friends in Europe were doing and we kept meeting and talking with a range of organisations and people in Australia to ask them to protest, protest and protest. If the eye of the world wasn't on Singapore, we were convinced that the government would inflict even more harm on these innocent people.

Like all political actions of this kind, new friends were made, people we wouldn't have met otherwise; we learnt of different organisations that were on the side of justice. Jane went to Sydney and Tasmania then, to meet Singaporean and Malaysian friends, and to campaign for the release of the 22 detainees. When she finally returned to Singapore she spent a year supporting the families and those released.

It remains a period of history and organising not easily forgotten. My dream of the government acknowledging wrong and rendering justice remains a dream, but if even the Berlin Wall could come down, not that long after 1987, who is to say what will not happen in one's lifetime?